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Bill Kristol is entitled to his optimism about democratic revolutions in the Islamic world. Perhaps the elections in Egypt will turn out better than those in Gaza where Hamas now rules a terrorist state; Iraq, prescription which has instituted an Islamic Republic; Lebanon, medical where Hezbollah now rules a terrorist state; and Afghanistan, medical which is a kleptocracy wooing the terrorist theocracy in Iran. What he should not be doing as a conservative leader is demonizing Glenn Beck, who has done more to educate Americans about the unholy alliance between the secular left and the Islamic jihadists than anyone else. Kristol needs to apologize to Beck for comparing him — outrageously — to the conspiracist Robert Welch, and should be embarrassed by his own ignorance of the agendas of both American radicals and their jihadist allies. At this point in time, such ignorance is not only inexcusable but dangerous.

As we conservatives celebrate the centennial of Ronald Reagan’s birth amid the uprising in Egypt, cialis sale we’d do well to reflect upon what it is that made Reagan such a unique, medical impressive and singular politician.

For me, no rx three traits in particular stand out: his strategic vision, his optimism, and his unwavering belief in the universal aspiration for liberty. Unfortunately, all three of these characteristics are sorely lacking, I regret to say, in most of the conservative commentary about Egypt, Islam and the Middle East.

Reagan, you will recall, came into office in 1981 when all of the “experts” — including many conservative “experts” and media desk jockeys — were convinced that the Soviet Union could never be defeated. It was too big, too powerful and too permanent.

Reagan disagreed. “It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history,” he said. It is “the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history…”

Would that today’s conservative “leaders” possessed Reagan’s wisdom and prescience. But alas, they do not. Instead, they seem convinced that radical Islam and “Sharia” are poised to overrun and overtake America.

On Fox’s Hannity Show, for instance, Frank Gaffney said that “the Obama administration’s policies are being viewed through, and actually articulated and implemented through, influence operations that the Muslim Brotherhood itself is running in our own country.”

Newt Gingrich, too, has been peddling fear: by warning of the dangers of “Sharia” in America, and despairing of a “strategic disaster” and a “dangerous outcome for the United States.”

David Horowitz, likewise, has been providing intellectual cover fire for the fearful and paranoid Right, especially Glenn Beck, who promotes Horowitz on his show.

Beck, of course, is notable of late for his ludicrous declaration that the Egyptian revolution could well lead to an Islamic caliphate, from Morocco to India to the Philippines.

Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol counters: “Beck brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society.” Beck, Kristol writes, is “marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s.”

Reagan would have acknowledged that radical Islam is a threat, just as communism was a threat. But the Islamists, like the communists, are not 10-feet tall. And where most conservatives saw despair and disaster, Reagan saw hope and opportunity.

Thus, against the counsel of many prominent conservative “leaders” and media desk jockeys, he reached out to, and negotiated with, Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev.

At the same time, Reagan bled the Soviet empire in Afghanistan and wreaked havoc with the Soviet economy. He did this by arming the Mujahideen, deregulating domestic U.S. energy markets and pressing Saudi Arabia to surge its oil production.

Reagan, I believe, would have seen similar hope and opportunity in the Egyptian revolution. He would have understood that even if the Egyptian people often lack the democratic vocabulary necessary to express their inchoate political desires, theirs is a yearning for dignity and liberty.

And so, Reagan, I dare say, would have reached out to and have supported the Egyptian people — just as he reached out to and supported the people in Poland and Nicaragua, Eastern Europe and Central America. He would have seen in the Egyptian uprising a great strategic opportunity to hasten the demise of radical Islam, and to effect crucial and long overdue reforms in the Arab and Islamic worlds.

Sure, many conservative “leaders” and media desk jockeys would lambaste such a vision as “foolish” and “naïve.” That’s what many of them said in the 1980s when Reagan insisted on dealing with Gorbachev and talked about rendering nuclear weapons obsolete.

But Reagan knew better. And the world is a vastly different and much better place as a result.

Indeed, the Berlin Wall was destroyed; communism in Eastern and Central Europe collapsed; and the Soviet Union dissolved. Not bad for a man whom the conservative cognoscenti often dismissed as a hopeless, cockeyed optimist.

The conservative movement needs a lot more of Reagan’s vision right now, especially vis-à-vis Egypt and the Middle East.

Alex Knepper tells an amazing story on the site today: a story that is at once shocking and also sadly a sign of the conservative times.

Knepper is an undergraduate at American University and an increasingly prominent voice on the libertarian-right blogosphere.

For the past few months he has been posting not only here at FrumForum.com but also at David Horowitz’s NewsReal blog. Abruptly this week, NewsReal ended its relationship with Knepper. Knepper’s offense? Sending NewsReal an expanded version of a blogpost here at FrumForum criticizing Ann Coulter’s about-face on the war in Afghanistan.

David Horowitz has been a fierce – ferocious! – critic of Western leftists who opposed the wars in Afghanstan and Iraq. In 2004, Horowitz published a whole book accusing the left of being joined to the Islamist cause. He dedicated the book “To the brave young men and women risking their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq for ours.”

And when some voices on the right began to join those left-wing critics of the war, Horowitz denounced those far-right isolationists as well. In a 2007 interview he called Congressman Ron Paul a “disgrace” and in the years since the two men and their admirers have exchanged heated words.

But in recent months, the ideas of the Ron Paul movement have begun to percolate through the more mainstream conservative world. Ron Paul has become a favored guest on the Glenn Beck program. And now Coulter too is giving voice to Paul-ist themes.

This trend has presented Horowitz with a problem. Beck and Coulter are also important allies and supporters of his. Horowitz is a frequent guest on the Beck program. Coulter attends and speaks at Horowitz’s “Restoration Weekends” in Palm Beach, a crucial event in the annual calendar of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

What to do as these two crucial Horowitz allies turn in exactly the direction Horowitz has so passionately condemned?

Answer: blast anybody who criticizes Horowitz’s crucial allies.

In 2009, I complained about Glenn Beck’s promotion of Ron Paul. Horowitz accused me of “psychosis,” prompting a debate you can read here.

When Matthew Continetti last month offered a gentle remonstrance against Glenn Beck’s conspiracy theories in the Weekly Standard, Horowitz’s NewsReal blog denounced him as an “alleged conservative” and a “cocktail conservative.”

Now Knepper’s criticism of Ann Coulter – in exactly the same terms as David Horowitz himself was using only a few months ago – has got Knepper bounced from Horowitz’s NewsReal blog altogether.

There’s beginning to be a pattern here.

When we on the center-right criticize extremist voices on the right, we are sometimes accused of opportunism, of betraying our principles to kiss up to powerful media personalities.

I’ve often wondered whether this was not an example of what the psychologists called “projection” – of attributing to others the motives that actually impel oneself. These days, I’m much more than wondering.

Click here for the final round in my debate with David Horowitz that started with David’s critique of my posts on Glenn Beck and Cass Sunstein.

In the debate, David offers as explicit and considered a defense as I’ve heard anywhere of the political strategy followed by conservatives this year. I offer my countervailing vision, along with some evidence for doubting that the approach championed by Horowitz will work.

One final comment in reply to David Horowitz’s third-round presentation. He writes:

I think Republicans generally want a fighter. You can be a centrist and a fighter. Why not? But in the first nine months of the Obama Administration, it is Palin who has set the standard in facing down the Left.

You say that angry protests did not work for the Left during the 60s. Are you forgetting that our angry protests were aimed at the Democrats and that by destroying the Democrats we elected Reagan governor of California, and Nixon president in 1968? Psychotic anger worked for the Democrats in 2006 and 2008 and brought them victories in Congress and the White House. What can you be thinking?

For those conservatives who want to import into our politics the style and attitudes of the 1960s, from the demonstrations to the promiscuous flinging of the accusations of “fascist” and “Hitlerite,” please note David’s description of its main accomplishment:

The 1960s Left succeeded in destroying the party most closely associated with it – and electing instead its fiercest opponents.

The final round of my debate with David Horowitz about Glenn Beck and the future of the Republican party appears on Frontpage.

Some excerpts:

FRUM: You think that conservatives lose when they are insufficiently vocal, check insufficiently confrontational, insufficiently mobilized. You see a national majority in Palin’s politics of cultural grievance, and the paranoid alienation Beck offers his Fox television audience. But the evidence is against you on all counts.

Angry protest politics did not work for the Left in the 1960s. Angry protest politics will not work for the right in the 2000s.

That’s not to deny the importance of this bloc of voters or the significance of their concerns. Rather, I’m saying that we have to join this bloc to the other blocs conservatives also need – married women, the educated, upwardly mobile immigrants. The wild, extreme and sometimes racially tinged talk we unfortunately hear from the most visible personalities on the right is detrimental to this effort.

HOROWITZ: I think Republicans generally want a fighter. You can be a centrist and a fighter. Why not? But in the first nine months of the Obama Administration, it is Palin who has set the standard in facing down the Left.

You say that angry protests did not work for the Left during the 60s. Are you forgetting that our angry protests were aimed at the Democrats and that by destroying the Democrats we elected Reagan governor of California, and Nixon president in 1968? Psychotic anger worked for the Democrats in 2006 and 2008 and brought them victories in Congress and the White House. What can you be thinking?

David Frum and David Horowitz debate Glenn Beck’s effect on the conservative movement. To read the earlier posts in this debate, click here.

David Horowitz: I agree with you David that this dialogue is getting more focused, and I find it much more pleasurable (and hopefully informative) as a result.

There are two issues here. One is a remarkable conservative outburst against the broadcaster Glenn Beck which includes you, Mark Levin and Pete Wehner among others, and which collectively wishes for his early self-destruction. The message from the three of you is that for the good of the conservative cause he should be silent — and the sooner the better. Wehner expresses the judgment I detect in all three of your blasts in this sentence: “The role Glenn Beck is playing is harmful in its totality.”

More than anything else, it is this that I am reacting to. I think this attitude is wrongheaded, absurd, destructive to the conservative cause and a blatant contradiction of the “big tent” philosophy which you otherwise support.

To read the rest of David Horowitz’s reply, please click here at FrontPageMag.com.

In a fiery debate, Frontpagemagazine.com editor David Horowitz accuses NewMajority’s David Frum of “scorched-earth attacks on Glenn Beck.” Frum replies:

David, your piece above is a real service. It focuses the issues very clearly and tightly in a way that helps everybody understand this discussion better, whatever side they ultimately end up on.

It’s bad luck for you that we are having this discussion in the same week that Glenn Beck a) expressed his enthusiasm for a Hillary Clinton presidency, b) stated that he thought Obama a better president than John McCain would have been, and c) wished that he could travel back in time to vote for Ron Paul. Now do you see what I mean when I call Beck “unscrupulous”? He’s an act, a showman, as indifferent to the future of conservative politics as he is to the facts of Cass Sunstein’s career. I agree he’s a very good showman, a natural TV talent. But he cares nothing, David, about politics in the way you care about it, and you are in for more nasty surprises if you continue to place your hopes in him.

In this, Beck is very different even from Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin. I’ve crossed swords with these other broadcasters for other reasons. I believe that their rage and extremism repel more supporters than they attract. But at least these broadcasters do know a lot about politics and hold considered and coherent worldviews. Beck, by contrast, is a random walk, capable of reaching any outcome. And I have to believe that after Beck’s performance over the past couple of days, you probably inwardly agree with me.

However, David, your post deals with more than Glenn Beck personally. You raise other important issues and present some personal challenges – and I take both very seriously.

You write: “[Al] Franken is now a U.S. Senator in part because conservatives of whom you are typical want to conduct politics by the Marquis of Queensberry rules when the other side is in it as war in which destruction of the enemy is the game.”

I am as disgusted as you by the election of Al Franken. Norm Coleman was one of the senators I admired most, and his defeat in the courts was a severe blow to the country and to the Republican party.

But it’s just plain wrong to suggest that Coleman lost because Republicans were not war-like enough in their political tactics. Coleman was the senator from Minnesota! His well-deserved reputation for decency, integrity and civility were huge political assets to him.

No, Al Franken is a senator for three very different reasons, which call for a different political approach than you propose.

Coleman lost (1) because the Democrats learned from the 2000 Bush v. Gore recount experience to organize much more effective close-election responses than the GOP. They worked better with local government officials, they fielded larger legal teams, and they did more effective media messaging. In other words: The Dems come to these kinds of fights better prepared, more sophisticated, and better financed than the Republicans.

Coleman lost (2) because five years of bad economic and foreign news had corroded support for Republicans nationwide – and not even as attractive a candidate as Coleman could survive in a state like Minnesota.

And Coleman lost (3) because beyond these political cycles, there has been since the mid-1990s a deeper and broader national trend away from a Republican party that seems out of touch and out of date to voters under 40 and outside the South.

The kind of “in your face” conservatism that you laud makes all these problems worse.

You challenge me to notice that the “embarrassments to our cause – the shrill, the enraged and the paranoid – who in your mind – seem to be Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and now Glenn Beck” are also our “most powerful and feared and charismatic conservatives.”

I challenge you to notice that all three of these people repel and offend many millions more Americans than they inspire and attract.

Look at the impact of this kind of politics on the three points I itemize above.

(1) If we accept that conservatism will remain a politics that is unacceptable to the young, the urban, and the educated, we will have great difficulty raising the resources and finding the volunteers to fight a recount battle on anything like equal terms. Jon Stewart’s audience will sleep on the floor, five to a room, through an Iowa winter. The Fox audience won’t and can’t.

(2) We lost in 2008 in large part because we had not governed successfully over the previous eight years. More than political tactics, more even than media, what matters in politics is results. If national incomes had grown by 1% a year under George Bush instead of stagnating, Al Franken would have lost in a landslide. Populists like Sarah Palin may excite a TV audience, but they cannot govern. They don’t like it and are not good at it. (That’s why Sarah Palin did not even complete one term in office, let alone run for a second.) Limbaugh and Beck style politics can gain ratings. It will not win re-elections.

(3) See point 1, only with triple exclamation marks.

Let me end by responding to your more personal remarks. You criticize me for being too tough on fellow-conservatives – and for taking some of these criticisms to a more general domain rather than keeping them in-house. And you know what? I too worry about this a lot.

I suppose I could point out in self-defense that nobody ever seems to mind very much when one or another of these conservatives speaks far more stridently about me than I have ever spoken about anyone – that the movement conservative version of Reagan’s 11th commandment seems very much a one-way option only to be exercised in favor of radio and TV hosts, never enforced against them. As self-defenses go, that would not be a very interesting one. Here’s something however that might be more interesting:

I speak out against people like Palin, Limbaugh and Beck because in my estimation they do enormous harm to the causes in which I believe. In my view, the talk-and-Fox complex marginalizes Republicans – and backs us into demagogic and unsustainable political positions. David, do you really want to abolish the Federal Reserve? Do you think the United States should have allowed Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and other banks to follow Lehman into bankruptcy in October 2008? Do you think that any cuts to Medicare amount to a death panel for grandma? Do you think we can sustain an adequate military – never mind finance future tax reductions – if we allow healthcare to continue rising from its current 16% of GDP to a projected 20% of GDP a decade from now if nothing changes?

I can’t believe you do. And if you don’t believe these things, is it not dangerous to have talk-and Fox whipping a couple of million conservatives into frenzy over things that are not true?

On the other hand, maybe I’m entirely wrong. Maybe “end the Fed” and “death panels” are a sustainable future for the conservative movement. Maybe talk-and-Fox are (as their admirers claim) energizing new and previously apolitical people to join the political process. If so, that would be a real achievement.

But is it so? I don’t believe it. I believe that their ratings and advertising imperatives are pushing them in a direction fundamentally antithetical to the electoral and governance imperatives of the GOP and the conservative movement.

Of course I could be wrong in my belief. So let me finish by issuing a proposition to you. Let’s test our diverging intuitions. Let’s sit down together and hire a mutually agreed pollster – Gallup? Whit Ayres? – to design a survey that can test whether the 9/12 protesters, the tea party attendees, the Glenn Beck audience really are new participants in politics.

If Beck is energizing new and previously apolitical people, then I will join you in saluting his achievement.

But if we discover that he is not energizing the previously apolitical – that he is instead inviting the Ron Paul contingent to take over as the new base and face of conservatism and Republicanism – then you’ll have to agree with me that we are witnessing a disaster in the making.

We don’t have to guess. We can know. Will you work with me to find out?

Republican senators know the truth about Cass Sunstein – Obama’s nominee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Only 33 Republican senators voted “no” on the cloture vote on his nomination, the vote that mattered. Yet unfortunately they also fear the wild disinformation broadcast by Fox News and credulously believed by millions of Fox viewers.

My real quarrel with Frum is that he denigrates Beck (”mob rule” indeed) and expresses the hope that Beck will soon be gone. This is more than over the top on Frum’s part. It is a betrayal of the conservative cause (much as his unseemly attack on Limbaugh was, too). Without voices like Beck’s and Limbaugh’s — and Ann Coulter’s for that matter — the conservative cause and the cause of this country would be hugely damaged.

In his attempted rebuttal of my post on Glenn Beck, David Horowitz agrees that Beck’s attack on Cass Sunstein was false. Yet that falsehood does not worry Horowitz. He would still rather have “Glenn Beck out there fighting for our side.” But how do we define “our side”?

[T]he question that David puts at the end of his blog — whose side is Glenn Beck on, is easy. He’s on our side. When I listen to Beck I don’t have any sense that he does not love this country — the actual country we live as opposed to some fantasy of the way it might have been 200 years ago or 200 years hence. In fact I have the sense that he loves this country and will risk his career to defend it — and that’s good enough for me.

What’s [Glenn] Beck’s crime regarding [Ron] Paul? Being too nice and respectful to him? Actually engaging Paul in intellectual discussion and admitting that he might agree with him on some issues? Maybe it’s just me but perhaps Frum’s attempt to mislead his center-right readership at Frum Forum about Beck’s views in order to banish him from Conservatism is a far greater offense.

Debating David Horowitz about Glenn Beck, I made the point that it was very strange that David Horowitz can excoriate Ron Paul and then enthusiastically defend Beck, who is (I wrote) Paul’s “chief TV enthusiast and publicist.” You’d think that reviewing Glenn Beck’s comments would be a matter of some urgency for David Horowitz.

Debating David Horowitz about Glenn Beck, I made the point that it was very strange that David Horowitz can excoriate Ron Paul and then enthusiastically defend Beck, who is (I wrote) Paul’s “chief TV enthusiast and publicist.”

I have to confess that I am not familiar with Beck’s promotion of Paul. If David wants to engage this I would have to review Beck’s statements about Paul first.

You’d think that review would be a matter of some urgency for David Horowitz. After all, Horowitz himself described Paul as “a crackpot, a conspiracy nut and a public menace… an anti-Semite and an America-hater.” To date, however, Horowitz has not found time to consider the record. Soon afterward, David Swindle appeared on David Horowitz’s Newsreal blog to deny that much of a record even existed.

Swindle linked to a Glenn Beck segment from Nov. 2007 in which Beck worried that some of Paul’s supporters might engage in domestic terrorism. On the basis of this link, Swindle concludes: “Beck, ‘Paul’s chief TV enthusiast and publicist,’ disagrees with Paul ‘vehemently’ on many issues. Who’s Frum kidding here?”

Swindle should have made time to view the new Beck show, the one on Fox, not CNN – the one on which David Horowitz is such a frequent guest. If Swindle had done this homework, here is some of what he would have found:

In January 2009, Beck is telling Paul that his words are “interchangeable” with those of the Founding Fathers, and by July 2009, Beck has utterly absorbed Paul’s crank monetary and banking theories as his own.

Then there are the too many segments to count in which Beck broadcasts Paulite ideas as his own, as for example here, here or here.

Horowitz and Swindle can say they were unaware of this material before. Well, they know it now. What’s the conclusion? Or will it be more of this, from David Horowitz’s most recent blogpost:

The eagerness of some conservatives like David Frum to throw Glenn Beck under the bus reminds me of Trotsky’s observation about pacificists as people who don’t want to get their moral principles wet.

I don’t know that I’d take moral instruction from Leon Trotsky. And it seems to me that the challenge to conservatives these days is not to keep our principles dry, but not to discard them in pursuit of bookings, audience, and donations.

I have a lot of time for David Horowitz. He has written important books and a fine memoir. His organizational work on college campuses commands respect.

For those reasons, troche I am grieved to see that his attempted rebuttal of my post below on Glenn Beck conforms exactly to the pattern I described in my original piece.

My original piece observed:

When Glenn Beck made his Fox debut, decease some shrewd conservatives responded with a wink. Maybe the show was paranoid and hysterical. Maybe Beck was none too scrupulous about facts and truth. But why be squeamish? The other side did as bad, sick or nearly. And see how usefully he mobilized the base!

I don’t have a big quarrel with Frum’s view that Beck’s view of Cass Sunstein is “over the top” or off target. … Frum is right that Sunstein is not a raving leftist. … [But] Our country is under assault by a determined, deceitful and powerful left which will stop at nothing to realize its goals. Facing them, I would rather have Glenn Beck out there fighting for our side than 10,000 David Frums who think that appeasing leftists will make them think well of us. No it won’t. It will only whet their appetite for our heads.

In other words: Horowitz agrees that Beck’s attack on Sunstein was false. Yet that falsehood does not worry Horowitz. The country is “under assault.” (As the broadcaster Mark Levin has said, President Obama is “literally at war” with the American people.) In a war, truth must yield to the imperatives of victory. Any conservative qualms about the untruth of Beck’s defamation of Sunstein amounts to “appeasement” – an appeasement that will end with the left decapitating the right. This is the language and logic of Leninism. There is no truth or falsehood comrades, there is only service to the revolution or betrayal of the revolution.

Three thoughts in reply.

First, even in Leninist terms, Beck’s attack on Sunstein was stupid and counter-productive. Every legal conservative who cares about the issues of regulation and deregulation agrees that Cass Sunstein is the very best choice for the OIRA job to be hoped from a Democratic president. Had conservative opposition somehow derailed the Sunstein nomination, President Obama’s next appointment would almost certainly have been worse – very possibly, a lot worse.

Second, this right-wing Leninism exacts a terrible moral price. Notice that David Horowitz calls the left “deceitful” in his blogpost. Presumably that’s a bad thing. Likewise, when Rep. Joe Wilson shouted “You lie” at President Obama, he did not intend that as a compliment. So truth is important to conservatives, or at least we talk as if it were. Yet now David Horowitz tells me that it’s 10,000 times more important to “fight for our side.”

Third – how do we define “our side”? Horowitz harshly condemns Obama appointee Van Jones. Van Jones was eventually forced to resign not because of any of the allegations Glenn Beck hurled at him, but because the Gateway Pundit blog unearthed evidence that Van Jones had consorted with 9/11 denialists. So that’s the other side, right? Except… the American politician who most closely associates with 9/11 denialists is Congressman and former presidential candidate Ron Paul. And who acts as Paul’s chief TV enthusiast and publicist? Glenn Beck of course.

David Horowitz has strong feelings about 9/11 and the post-9/11 world. He helped to lead the campaign against Ward Churchill, the disgraced University of Colorado professor who argued that the United States had brought 9/11 on itself. Question for David: If Ward Churchill is “the other side,” on which “side” do we find Ron Paul? And isn’t that the same “side” where we find Glenn Beck?